Originally Posted by Joe Obenberger

Sure.

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights?

Have you read the Federalist Papers, anything by John Locke or Thomas Hobbes, or maybe JJ Rousseau, all of whom deeply inspired them?

The American Revolution was about inviolable personal rights to freedom, the rights protected by natural law, which no state is free to abridge. That's a 180 from a theocracy. They knew the dangers of tyrannical theocracy - and that's why the Bill of Rights prohibits an establishment of religion. That's a pretty fundamental difference.

So, you'll respond to talk about aboriginal persons and slaves. The English simply had not reached a consensus about the rights of persons who were not part of the body politic. They should have concluded that, if rights come from natural law, that they extend to all humans. But I think that among the protestants, who entirely dominated the Revolution, there actually was dispute about whether aboriginals and Negroes were human beings. The Catholics had resolved that issue centuries before, but weren't enthusiastic about democracy in general, and so it only meant anything important to marriage and family of slaves in Catholic countries.

There isn't any dispute of how the radical muslims look at the rights of nonmuslims. They are nonexistent for persons who are not "of the book", and sharply constrained for Christians and Jews. They both can be enslaved at will, by capture. No one in the American Revolution held that view. But all of this concerning aboriginal persons and slaves is a sideshow issue (except to the people affected!) to whether the two groups have much in common. They don't. ISIS is driven by religious fervor towards absolute, tyrranical theocracy. The Founders were driven by natural law principles about the dignity and rights of individuals - especially the rights of individuals against large majorities of people who would deprive them of fundamental freedoms. "Fundamental Freedom" is a concept that simply has no meaning in Islam, there is freedom only to be a muslim.

That's the difference.